Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

dosage: Get yours daily

It seems like a very long time since dailystrips, the comic downloader that had too many years between it and the current generation of comic hosting sites. dailystrips tried hard but as best I could tell, was unlikely to ever recover its 2003-era glory.

dosage, on the other hand, seems to have a firm grasp of The Way Things Are Now.

dosage takes the name of the comic as a target, and dutifully downloads the image at your command. It also archives those targets in a folder tree, meaning after you start collecting images, dosage only needs one abbreviated command to update your entire collection.

It’s a good system and lends itself to the process. To add to that, you can attach target dates to dosage commands, and retrieve specific issues. Or add the -a flag, and pull down everything from a date to present. And retrieve “adult” comics, with a specific flag.

Supposedly dosage can retrieve around 2000 comics from their respective host, and I can vouch for two or three I really didn’t think it would know, but it grabbed quite willingly. If you want to test its ability, you can feed it the --list flag, and see a giant list of what it knows, sent straight to your $PAGER.

I see where dosage flags multi-language comics with their translations, and so if you’re looking for something in another tongue, dosage may be able to help you.

Compared with dailystrips, dosage seems to have better access and better retrieval skills. Of course, that’s not really fair since dailystrips hasn’t seen much activity over the last decade.

dailystrips did have the option to build primitive HTML pages and plant your comics in them though, and while I do see something similar in dosage, it took me a few tries to build it correctly, and it seemed rather finicky if it had already built a file.

dosage is quite useful and if you’re a fan of comics — printed or electronic — it’s a must-have tool. And the beauty of dosage may be that it doesn’t require you to live in a graphical environment, since it’s primarily the downloader and organizer, and not the viewer.